Every good filmmaker should make an end-of-the-world picture. It would be fun to compare the different versions of a very similar situation.
Last year we had “28 Days Later,” which memorably went the zombie route. Austrian director Michael Haneke, one of the most serious and rigorous filmmakers in the world, has now brought his own vision to bear on the desolate situation. True to form, it’s a difficult and unsparing movie.
Ultimately, every apocalyptic film is about how mankind reacts to disaster, and how a society might re-form itself from ground zero. Even if said movie is couched as a zombie flick.
“Time of the Wolf,” Haneke’s film, proposes emotional zombies. In the movie’s first scene, a family of four arrives at their country home, somewhere in France.
Almost instantly, the husband is shot dead by squatters in the house. The wife, Anna (Isabelle Huppert) and her adolescent daughter and small son flee into the night. They leave their supplies and car behind at gunpoint.
It’s only as the next few scenes unfold that we realize something is wrong in the world at large. Neighbors turn the starving, distraught family away. Anna and her children walk through a small town, where we see the legs of horses sticking morbidly out of a huge bonfire – the image has the violence of a Picasso painting.
Obviously, something has happened – pestilence or war, we never find out what. Pinning their hopes on the rumor that a train might stop at a particular station in the countryside, Anna takes her children there and joins the ad hoc society.
This is where Haneke creates his critique of our world, by refracting it through this exaggerated rendering of a society. Bad leadership, suspicion of outsiders, cutthroat business practices, the bartering of bodies and souls for survival – it all plays out in and around the train station.
As the movie progresses, we find ourselves viewing this not through the eyes of Anna, but through her daughter, played by Anais Demoustier. She reaches out to a cold-hearted boy her age who knows nothing but thievery.
Isabelle Huppert gave a knockout performance in Haneke’s previous film, “The Piano Teacher,” but here she gamely recedes into the background. It’s not a film about stars, or acting, but about the bleakest, most de-romanticized game of “Survivor” ever played.
The film is tough. Haneke refuses to give the audience any conventional solace (his film “Funny Games” was a primer on how to withhold any shred of audience comfort or expectation). The emptiness of the setting made it less engaging and more monotonous than his previous films.
But when he arrives at the final five minutes, the style pays off. Having stripped away the myths, Haneke suggests ways in which societies invent myths to keep ourselves going. If the definition of a thought-provoking movie is one that gives few answers, “Time of the Wolf” fits the definition.
“Time of the Wolf” HHH
Unsparing: In a post-apocalyptic world (never explained), a mother and her two children huddle in a train station with other survivors. Austrian director Michael Haneke brings his unsparing style to this bleak scenario, which is a little monotonous but thought-provoking. (In French, with English subtitles.)
Rated: R rating is for violence, nudity.
Now showing: Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St., Seattle; 206-523-3935, www.grandillusioncinema.org
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